Sermons tagged with Provision

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. If you're in the back there, that looks pretty crowded. You'd like some more room. We got two completely empty rows right here in the front. Just get up in front of everyone and come sit right here. That's where we make the latecomers sit, so we parade you in front of everyone. This is the first part of our new series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going to be going through the Gospel of Mark for a long time. For about 12 weeks, it's going to carry us all the way until Easter. And so I'm excited to kind of steep in this book together in Mark's Gospel. As we approach the gospel, it begins in a way, at the beginning chapters of the gospel of Mark, there is a story that's ubiquitous in all of the gospels, and they all have this towards the beginning. And it's kind of, in my view, a story about people who had disqualified themselves from a particular service. And we'll talk about why in a minute. But it reminds me of a time when I disqualified myself from something, which was my freshman year of college. You may not know this about me. I got my degree from a small Bible school called Toccoa Falls College that I would not recommend to anyone. That place was boring. I did meet Jen there, though, so that's nice, but we both hated it. But my freshman year, I went to Auburn University. I went there because it was February or March, I think, and I had not taken the SATs or applied to a college yet, and one of my good friends that I played volleyball with every afternoon said, hey, I'm going to Auburn, would you like to be my roommate? And I said, do you have an application? And he goes, yes. I said, will you fill it out for me? He goes, yes. I said, great, send it in. And so then literally two weeks later, I get home from school, and my mom's like, what's this? It's an acceptance letter from Auburn. It was never even on the radar screen so I'm a freshman year I go to Auburn University Auburn does not have an intercollegiate men's soccer team but they did have a club team and for those of you who don't know what a club team is it's it's a glorified intramural team you try out for it and then you go play other schools in the area that also have club soccer teams and so I thought I'd go out for this team because I play, I'm not trying to brag, I played all four years in high school. I was a four-year letterman at Killian Hill Christian School. Now, it didn't matter to me that the entire high school consisted of about 100 students. Roughly 50 of those are boys. Roughly 20 of those have ever touched a soccer ball in their life. And about five of us had, like, played consistently. So that didn't factor in. I thought I was good at soccer. My junior year, we won the state championship. I was the MVP of the state championship game. My senior year, I made All-State. So I go to tryouts at Auburn thinking I'm somebody. Michelle Massey's back there grinning at me because she even played actual Division I soccer and knows the difference, right? She knows what I was about to walk into. She succeeded where I failed miserably. So I go to tryouts the first day and there's like 250 people there. 250 to 300 grown men are there. I had, the most people I'd ever seen at a tryout was like 25 and everybody made it,. The coaches took him because he felt bad for him that's why we got pudgy seventh graders with state championship patches on their arm right now because the coach felt bad for them. So I go to tryouts and I'm looking at my competition. Now when I was a freshman in college this may be hard to believe but I was a hundred and fifty five pounds soaking wet. All right I it's a little, I put on a few since then. I was a skinny little nothing. And I'm looking at these guys that I'm now trying out against and they have like hairy chests and muscles and stuff. And I am out of my depth. And I was just immediately so intimidated. And that was the, that was the day where I realized I wasn't an athlete, right? I had, previous to that day, previous to that tryout, I had always thought I was pretty athletic. And then when I went to that tryout and I watched other athletes actually do athletic things, I realized you're a coordinated white kid. You are not an athlete. And so I did the best I could to go through the tryout, had a good attitude, tried to keep my head up, do the best that I could. But by the end of it, I just realized this ain't it. And so they got us together and they said, hey, listen, we're going to whittle. There's 250 of you. We're going to whittle it down to 50. If you're invited to the tryout tomorrow afternoon, we're going to put your name on a list in the student union. Go to the student building, whatever it is. go there and the Foy Student Union Center and We're gonna post a list of 50 names if your names on the list you're invited to come try out again tomorrow We'll whittle it down to 25 Well, I got up the next day and do you want to know what I did not go do? That's right walk to the Foy Student Union Center to see if my name was on the list I knew pretty good good and well it wasn't. I took myself out of the running for that. I went ahead and told them, you don't fire me, I quit. Before you, even if my name's on the list, I'm not trying to, I don't like your attitude. Like I'm not going. I knew that my name wasn't on that list, not even worth the seven minute walk across campus to figure it out. I completely took myself out of the running. And what we see at the beginning of Mark is something that we see when this happens in the other Gospels, where we have some people who have either been told by themselves or by others, you're not good enough to make the team. You're out of the running. You're disqualified. Now, as we dive into Mark, I would be remiss if I didn't give just a little bit of background on it. I'm not going to do much because not much is required, but every gospel, all four of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written to different audiences. Mark is written to the Romans and it depicts Jesus as a servant. So Mark is the fastest moving gospel in the Bible. It's very quick, very fast paced from task to task to task because Mark is painting Jesus as a servant. That's what he's doing, and he wants to see that this is where we see like he must become greater, I must become less. This is where we see the greatest, whoever is greatest of you must be the servant of all. Those are Mark's words. And I would tell you if you've never read a gospel before, Mark is a great one to start with. It's incredibly, as far as gospels are concerned, action packed. It just goes from event to event to event. He doesn't dally in the inefficient details. But that's the gospel of Mark, and that's where we're going to be. And the series is called Mark's Jesus. This is the Jesus that Mark saw as he heard the stories from Peter. And so in this first chapter of Mark, the other gospels tarry a little bit at the beginning. Matthew and Luke kind of focus on genealogy and the Christmas story and the early years. And then the Gospel of John focuses on the ministry of John the Baptist kind of paving the way for Christ. But Mark jumps right into it. And halfway through the first chapter, Jesus is already calling his 12 disciples. And we have maybe the most famous call here in Mark chapter 1, verses 16 through 20, where Jewish educational system. Because if we don't understand the Jewish educational system, then some of what happens here doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right? Some of what happens here is curious. Have you ever wondered why the disciples just immediately, he's in the boat with his dad. He's doing his job. This is his future. And Jesus says, follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. And he's like, see you dad. And he goes, he leaves his job. We'll talk more about the call of Matthew, the tax collector, but Matthew's collecting taxes when Jesus calls him and he gets up from his career and he follows Jesus immediately. Have you ever wondered why they do that? I think when I was growing up and I was, and I encountered these passages, I just assumed that it was because they know who Jesus is. Jesus is Jesus, and so they want to be around Jesus because they've heard about Jesus and they want to follow Jesus. And that's not true. They didn't know yet that he was the Messiah of the world. They didn't know yet what that meant. So they're not following Jesus because he's Jesus. There's something more at play there. And when I explain to you kind of how the educational and rabbinical and discipleship system work, I think it might make sense to more of us. So I'm going to get in some details a little bit, but this helps us understand the calling of the disciples and then therefore our call so much better. So if you grew up in ancient Israel, if you grew up at the time of Christ, then you would start Jewish elementary school at about five years old. And Jewish elementary school would go from the age of five to 10. Boys and girls would do it together. And in these first five years, you would study the first five books of the Old Testament, what they called the Tanakh. And this was the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. You'd spend the first five years of your education studying those five books, and the goal was to memorize those five books. This is a culture with oral tradition. Memorization is heavy. People aren't writing things down and taking notes. So the idea of memorizing large swaths of text like that is not as anathema to them as it is to us. It was very approachable for them. We've lost that part of our brain a little bit with the ability to write things down all the time. But they would try to memorize the first five books of the Old Testament and become a master of those. Then at the age of 10, you would graduate to what I believe was called Beth Medrash Middle School. From 10 to 11, the girls, the Jewish girls, would learn Deuteronomy. They would focus more in on Deuteronomy for the worship aspects of it, and then they would look at Psalms, and they would look at Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, the wisdom books, because the women in Jewish history at this time carried the bulk of the load for the worship. So they were the ones that led the worship at the beginning in the temple. Now you guys can do what you want to to make jokes about Aaron's profession in your head, all right? I'm too dignified to do that, so I'm just going to let you do it. But that was the women's responsibility early on. And so from 10 to 13, middle school girls focused on that. And at 13, middle school girls graduated. Now help your mama, help your grandmama participate in the gathering, participate in the leading of worship. That was the role. But little boys would study the law and the prophets. So they would study the rest of the Old Testament or the Tanakh, and they would try to become masters of that. Then at 13, they would take a little break and they would go home and they would learn their father's profession. So if your dad was a fisherman, you'd go, you went home and you learned how to fish. If your dad was a tax collector, you'd go do that. If your dad, if your dad was a carpenter, you'd go be a carpenter, right? That's why it's important that we know what Joseph's profession was because that was Jesus's future had he not stayed in the educational system. So you would go and do that. And then around age 15, if you wanted to do more than that, if you wanted to continue your education, you would go find a rabbi that was legally allowed within the church to have disciples. And you would say, can I follow you? Will you be my rabbi? And if that rabbi said yes and accepted you as a student, which was very exclusive and very, very difficult to get into, listen to me, this is not an exaggeration. To become a disciple in ancient Israel at the time of Christ is not dissimilar at all from getting a scholarship to an Ivy League school. It's not dissimilar at all from going to Harvard or Yale or Georgia Tech. It was really like elite. For the new people, NC State stinks and Georgia Tech's the best. That's the basic line of joking that's been present for the duration of my tenure. But it was not dissimilar to getting to go to an Ivy League school. Your future is very bright. And only the best of the best get accepted, get taken on as disciples. And you wouldn't wait for the rabbi to come to you. You went to the rabbi and you would say, can I follow you? And what that question really means is, can I be who you are? Do I have what it takes to do what you do? And the rabbi would decide yes or no, whether or not to take you on as a disciple, as a student. And then from 15 to sometimes as late as 30, which makes sense why Jesus's ministry started at 30, you would train under your rabbi And he would teach you to do what he did. And there was a saying, may you be ever covered in the dust of your rabbi. May you be following so closely behind him on the dusty streets of Israel that his dust is kicked up on you and you are covered in the dust of your rabbi. You're following him to learn to do what he does. Okay? Understanding that, looking back at the text that we read, when Jesus sees Simon, Peter, what are they doing? They're fishing. What does that tell you about where they were in life and what the educational system had told them at some point? Because if at any point you weren't progressing as a student, if you're doing middle school and your teacher's like, nah, you're not really getting it, that's okay. Go home, be a godly fisherman, come to the temple and tithe and serve God in other ways. We're going to let the more elite students serve you in that way. If your rabbi said you're just not getting it, go home at 20 years old, be a godly carpenter. We love you. You're a good person. Serve the Lord in different ways. You're not qualified for this way. So the fact that Peter and James and John are at home with their dads fishing tells us that at some point or another, voices from within or without disqualified them from further education. And make no mistake about it, it's not as if they weren't interested. The ancient Hebrews, ancient Israel, didn't have professional sports. There was no gladiatorial arena. There was no way to make it. There was no way to ascend to the next level of society. There was no way to make your name great. There was no way to get famous. The only path forward to do any of those things, to make something of yourself, to be somebody, was to be a rabbi and hopefully elevate to Pharisee or a member of the Sanhedrin. That was the only way to climb the ladder in ancient Israel. So every little boy wanted to be a disciple one day and wanted to be a rabbi one day. And every father wanted their little boy to be a disciple who becomes a rabbi. That was the almost ubiquitous dream of ancient Israel. And so Peter and James and John fishing with their dad tells us that at some point a voice from within or without told them that they were not qualified to continue in service to God's kingdom in that way. Do you see that? And when I say from within or without, it could have been a voice within, like my voice at Auburn, going, dude, you don't need to go look at that list. You're not making it. Maybe they never went to a rabbi and said, can I follow you? Because they just knew what the answer would be. Or maybe they did go to a few and they kept getting shot down. But for some reason or another, what it tells us is that a voice from within or without had told them that they were not qualified. Somebody told them they weren't talented enough to do this. And then I also think of Matthew and his call. Matthew, who's the author of the first gospel in the New Testament, was a tax collector. Tax collectors were deplorable in ancient Israel. They were deplorable because they were turncoats and they were traders to their people for the sake of their own pocketbook, for the sake of their own greed. Here's how the tax collecting system worked in ancient Israel. Israel is a far-flung province of the Roman Empire, headed up by a likely failed senator named Pilate, because you don't get sent to Israel to be the governor from Rome unless you're terrible at your job and the emperor doesn't like you anymore. It's like being the diplomat to whatever the heck, okay? Go out here. We're going to put you in the wilderness for three years. Pilate's leading ancient Rome. His only, or leading ancient Israel, his only job is to keep the peace and keep the money flowing. That's it. Squelch rebellion, keep the income coming in. How do they make income? They tax the people. They tax the people at a rate that they had never been taxed before in their history. And this rendered many, many, many of the families in Israel as completely impoverished. They are living lives of what we would say is abject poverty. And the way that those taxes got paid is the tax collector, you'd go to the tax collector to pay your taxes, and Rome said it's a 20% tax on all goods and income, and the tax collector would go, oh gosh, looks like it's 22.5% this year. Looks like it's 25% this year. They would just tack on a few extra percentage points to make whatever they could make to get money off of you by being a toy of the empire of Rome. They were turncoats who rejected their people for the sake of their own greed. They were disrespected. They were considered sinful and sinners. They were considered unclean because they handled money all the time. To be a tax collector is to disconnect from your spiritual heritage. It's to choose to live a life that you know disqualifies me from service in God's kingdom. I have put that thought away. I will never think about it again. So Matthew was a person who had chosen a path in life that was completely separate from a religious path and had at some point or another inevitably made the decision due to the cognitive dissonance of the two existing of, I am not going to embrace that religious faithful life anymore. I'm not good enough for it. I cannot do it. I cannot serve it. That is not me. I'm going to make a decision for myself to live greedily and selfishly and indulge in my own sin and in my own desire. That's what he did. So he had chosen a life that anyone around him, including himself, would have said, I am not worthy to be used in the kingdom of God in any way, and I'm good with it. And yet Jesus goes to him and calls him too. Now here's what's remarkable to me about the calling of these disciples. One of the things. Jesus had every right as a rabbi who had achieved an authority that allowed him to call disciples. He had every right to sit back and wait for young men to come to him and ask him if they could follow him. He had every right to stay back and say, hey, I'm a rabbi. Now's the time. If you want to come work for me, let me know. And he doesn't do that. We see him pursuing the disciples. He doesn't wait for Peter to come to him and say, Jesus, may I follow you? He goes to Peter and he says, would you like to follow me? He goes to John and James and says, would you like to follow me? He goes to the tax collector who would never, ever, ever have the audacity to go to Jesus, the rabbi, the son of God and say, can I please follow you? No, he would never have the audacity to do that. His life of sin had disqualified him from approaching Christ. And Christ doesn't wait for him to get over that to invite him. No, he goes to Matthew in his sin, in his deplorable life, in his feeling like crud, and he says, would you follow me? And what do they all do? They all immediately throw down everything and follow Christ. And what we see here is that Jesus has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. Jesus, like his dad, has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. In the Old Testament, God called out to Abraham and told him what to do. He showed himself to Moses in the burning bush and told him what to do. He showed himself to David and told him what to do. He pursued his children in the nation of Israel over and over and over again, generation after generation after generation, despite their rejection, despite their betrayal, despite their refusal to obey him and to follow him and to serve him. He pursues and pursues and pursues. And when that pursuit isn't enough, he sends his son as a personification of divinity to pursue us in human form. It is. That's very good. If you didn't hear that, somebody's phone in the front row, Siri, just to find personification for us in case you didn't know what that was. It's in the back next week. We see Jesus early in his ministry display this pattern of pursuit where he goes to the disciples. He doesn't wait for them to come to him. We see later on when Jesus teaches about the 99 and he says that a good shepherd leaves the 99 and pursues the lost sheep. We see him telling a story of a rich man whose son went off and squandered his money on wild living. And as he came back home, the rich man saw him far off and he went running to him. He pursued him. Our God does not sit back and wait for us to come to him. Jesus says he stands at the door and knocks, waiting for us to let him into our lives. Our Jesus chases after us. He pursues us. He does it gently, but he does it relentlessly. And many of you, I would wager all of you, at one point or another, even at your worst, sometimes especially at your worst, have felt this gentle, relentless pursuit of Christ, have felt Christ whispering to you in the shadows and in the isolation that he still loves you, he still cares about you, he's still coming for you. You've seen how he pursues people in your life. You know experientially how Christ never gives up on you. There is no barrel that has a bottom too far down for Christ to not chase you there. He has an incredible pattern of pursuit. And Jesus continues to pursue us to this day. He continues to pursue you. And what I want you to hear this morning more than anything else is, that invitation that he extends to these disciples that he pursued, Come and follow me. Very, very simple invitation. It's the same one that he extends to you this morning. Come and follow me. Come follow me. Now, here's what's so important to understand about this call and this invitation. The disciples, Peter, James, John, Matthew, Andrew, the rest of them, Thomas, they did not know then at their call, Nathaniel and Philip, they did not know at their call that Jesus was the Messiah and they didn't know what it meant to be the Messiah. The only person on the planet, I believe at this point in history, who knew who Jesus was and what he came to do was marry his mother. I don't think anybody else had an accurate clue what he was doing. So the disciples definitely don't know that he's the Messiah and they don't even really know what the Messiah is. They don't even yet know that he's the son of God. That has not been revealed to them yet. Jesus has not made that public yet. And what we see in the three years of ministry, what we'll see throughout the rest of the gospel of Mark is this progressive revelation and understanding amongst the disciples about who Jesus is. We fast forward a year in and Jesus comes out on the boat and he calms the storm, right? He says, wind and waves be still. And he calms the storm and he goes back down into the hold and he goes to sleep. And what did the disciples say? Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? The last week of his life, Jesus is walking into the city of Jerusalem and James and John are lagging behind him arguing about who gets to be the vice president and the secretary of defense. They still don't get it. So when Jesus calls them and they receive the call, they were not encumbered with all this sense of belief that we encumber that with. They simply responded to who he was and said, okay, I'll go. They didn't know all there was to know about Jesus. They didn't even fully believe in Jesus yet. But they responded to his invitation and they followed. And the same invitation with the same parameters and expectations around it is extended to us and every generation through the centuries to simply follow Jesus. Here's another thing I love about this invitation from Jesus to follow him. He didn't just give them protection. He gave them purpose. He wasn't just offering them, because when we think about Jesus extending an offer, us follow me and I'll make you fishers and men, come follow me, come let me in, I stand at the door and knock, let me into your life. When we think about responding to the invitation of Christ, I think we typically take that to the moment of salvation. I'm going to respond to the invitation of Christ by letting him into my life and I'm going to become a Christian. That's typically where we go with that. But I would say, first of all, I think that this is a daily response to choose to follow Jesus every day. Second of all, when we reduce following Jesus, that moment of salvation to just now I'm in, now I'm a Christian, and that's it. When we make that the inflection point, we reduce the call of Christ down to mere protection. Protection from hell, eternal separation from God, protection from our sins, I no longer have to pay the penalties for those, protection in taking us to heaven, protection in overcoming sin and death. If we've've lost a loved one who also knows Jesus then we know that one day we get to see them again that when we say goodbye to them on their deathbed it's goodbye for now not goodbye forever so we're offered protection over sin and death and sometimes we reduce the call of Christ down to this offer of protection follow me and I will protect you from your sins and from the judgment of God and from the pains of death. And then one day everything will be perfect in eternity. Just hold on until we get there. But no, he doesn't just offer them protection. He offers them purpose. Because what does he say after he invites them to follow me? Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Follow me and I will imbue your life with a greater sense of purpose than you've ever had. Follow me, I have things for you to do. Follow me, I believe in you. Follow me, we're going to do great things. And I'm going to equip you for everything that I want you to do. And he imbues us with purpose that he's got plans for us in his kingdom. And just like then when Jesus asked them to follow and said, come and follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. He also tells us vicariously through the Great Commission, the last thing that Jesus instructs the disciples to do, go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Don't go into all the world and make converts. Don't go into all the world and offer my protection and that's it. Go into all the world and offer them my protection and my purpose. Make disciples and train them to do what I trained you to do. Go and make people who contribute to the ministry and the kingdom of God. We're all kingdom builders pushing this thing forward. That's how we talk about it around here. So he imbues us with purpose. And the same invitation to the disciples there is the one that he offers us this morning. Jesus is not, when he comes to you and he says, follow me, just follow me, just do what I'm asking you to do. It's not a simple offer of protection. It's an offer to imbue your life with purpose. I'm going to make your life matter in the kingdom of God. I want you to experience what it is to do my work and to love my people. It's a remarkable, remarkable invitation. And even as I articulate those things, I am certain that most of us in this room have already found ways to disqualify ourselves with the voices from within and from without from this call of Jesus. I'm certain that there are plenty of you who are sitting there during this sermon, hopefully thinking along with me, nodding along with me. Yes, believe all that. Yes, he calls us and he equips us. Yes, I agree with that. Yes, Jesus offers that same invitation. Yeah, they were unqualified. I feel unqualified, but I'm not yet sold. This sermon is for other people with more talent. It's for people who are younger than me. It's for people who are more charismatic than me. It's for people who have more potential than me, who are better looking than me, whatever it might be. So yeah, I agree, Nate, with the points that you're making, but that's not really for me. And what I want you to see is that that's your disqualifying voice coming from within or without that's telling you stuff that's not true about yourself. There's got to be a handful of us in here who go, yeah, I'm just a mom. That's what I do. I'm just a mom and my world is so small. God can't possibly have a plan for me to be used in incredible ways to build his kingdom. That's not true. We're told that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. God has a plan for you. God has something he wants to do with your life. He has a way that he wants to use you. He has a load that he wants you to carry joyfully and gleefully as you go through your life doing his work. He's created you for that. The problem, and he invites us this morning just as he invited the disciples to walk in that purpose and in that usefulness. The problem is we continue to have these voices that we believe in our head that tell us that we're not good enough, that we're not smart enough. I'm too old. I just teed off on 18, buddy. Like I'm looking at the sunset. That's a young man's game. Let somebody else do that work. I'm coasting it in, loving my grandkids. That's not for me. Or I'm too young. No one's going to listen to me. Or I don't have enough education. I'm not qualified enough to do this. Or I'm too inconsistent in my walk. Or I feel like Matthew and the choices that I've made in life have utterly you that you're not qualified for service in the kingdom of God do not come from God. They come from the world. They come from you. And they come from the people in your past who, well-meaning or not, damaged you and told you you weren't good enough and that you couldn't do it. I carry myself plenty of wounds from people that I respect a lot who indicated to me directly and indirectly that I would never make it in ministry. You've had people in your life, well-meaning or not, who have indicated to you in different ways, directly and indirectly, that you don't really have a lot to offer the kingdom of God. You've told yourself that so many times that you now can't even sort out the truth of where these voices are coming from. But here's what I want you to understand this morning. We are not qualified for ministry by our talent. We are qualified by our Savior. We are not qualified for service in God's kingdom by the gifts and abilities that we bring to the table. We are qualified by our Savior and by him alone. Do you think for a second there was anybody in Peter's life? If you know what you know about Peter, Peter was ready, fire, aim. That was him. Peter having nothing to say, thus said. He was always the one out in front, sticking his foot in his mouth. Do you think anybody looked at Peter at this point in his life on the banks of the Sea of Galilee outside the city of Capernaum and went, you know what this guy is? This guy's probably going to be like the very first head pastor of this movement that Jesus is about to birth with his perfect life and death. I bet he's going to be the guy. Nobody said that about Peter. Do you think anybody looked at John, who was maybe 10 to 15 years old at the time of his call? Do you think anybody looked at John and went, you know what John's probably going to do? John's probably going to write a gospel that's different and more influential than the others. He's going to write three great letters that are going to be included in the canon and printed for all of time. And he's going to write the apocryphal book in the New Testament that tells us about the end times. And he's going to die a martyr. He's going to be the last of the generation of disciples to die on the island of Patmos, an honorable death. And he's going to be so close to Christ during these next three years that the Savior of the universe is going to refer to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Not even John's mom thought that was possible. Nobody thought that was going to happen to the two boys called the sons of thunder, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. Nobody looked at Matthew collecting taxes and thought, you know what? This degenerate, who's totally rejected religion religion and the world and rejected his community and the people around him, he's going to become a disciple that writes one of the four gospels that's read by more people in human history than any other book. That's probably what Matthew's going to do. Nobody, nobody but Jesus looked at those disciples before their call and had any clue or any vision about how he could use them in his kingdom. Nobody but Jesus would have believed the plans that he had for those young men. So who are you to look at Christ and tell him that he can't use you? Nobody but Jesus knows what path you can have from this day forward. Nobody but God has the vision for what your life can be in the years that he is giving to you. Nobody knows what your potential is, least of all you. Our talent does not qualify us for service in God's ministry. Our Savior does. But we're so busy avoiding the walk to the student union because we are certain that our name is not on the list, that we don't even try, and we disqualify ourselves from service in God's kingdom. And I just want to remind you of this, that God alone can cast you aside, and he's promised never to do that. You can't disqualify yourself. Only God can do that. And he's promised to never forsake you. Only God can cast you aside and he will not do that. So quit casting yourself aside. This morning comes down to two simple thoughts. Whose voice are you going to believe about who you are and what God has planned for you? The world's or God's? Because a lot of us have been spending a lot of time listening to the world, believing that God's voice is for other people beside us. And the second one is this. Will you accept that simple invitation that tumbles down through the centuries from our Savior, that is the same now as it was then? Will you accept Christ's invitation to follow him and go where that leads? Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a God who pursues. Thank you for being a God who chases. For a God who believes and equips and calls and qualifies. Lord, I lift up those of us in this room who feel particularly unqualified. Who feel that our poor choices, our bad decisions, our lack of discernible skills, at least according to us, disqualify us from any kind of use in your kingdom. Father, would you help our eyes open to the reality that no one but you knows what your plans are. No one but you knows what you can do with a willing servant who will simply follow you. No one but you knows the potential of use and blessing and life that exists in this room. And so God, I pray that we would follow you. And I pray that we would begin to choose to listen to your voice about who we are and what we can do. And that we would refuse to listen to our own that doesn't tell us the truth. Help us to be followers of you and imbue us with purpose to build your kingdom. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Jim Adams. I'm one of your elders, well actually an elder in training. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be one of your elders. I want to read for you today Psalms 127. It's another one of the songs of ascent and it's generally a credit to Solomon, wise King Solomon. I think you'll understand why when I read. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and you stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves. Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate. Thank you, Jim. I believe you got what it takes. You'll be a full elder in no time. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I'll just tell you right up front, off the top, this is a different Sunday than we normally have. This is really a family talk masquerading as a sermon that I'm about to do. So I would tell you this, if this is your first Sunday with us, they're not normally like this. I'm also not talking to you today. Okay, so whatever I say, I'm not asking you for anything. I'm not implying that you should do anything. I hope that you'll come see us again on a normal Sunday. But every now and again, it falls on us as a church to have a Sunday like this, because I want to take our collective focus and place it on what we believe. And when I say we, I mean the elders, what we believe God wants us to do next as a church. So this morning is going to feel a little different. I want us to focus this morning on our campaign. You've probably noticed when you come in the wall opposite the sound booth in the lobby, there's a blueprint of a church, a nice looking blueprint with floor plans and everything. And then there's a facade that you've seen, and it's our goal to build that on four acres of land around the corner on Litchford. And this morning, I want us to talk about it because, A, I haven't talked about it in over a year from here. I've written a letter about it once or twice. I may have emailed about it, but I haven't spoken about it corporately in over a year. And it's time that we do that. More than that, we started this in February of 2020. And so many of you in the room have not been here and were not here when we were talking about this as a church and why we were deciding to do it and move ahead with the pursuit of a permanent home in North Raleigh. And so a lot of us simply need to be caught up and informed on what we're doing and why we are doing it. To do that, I wanted us to see a video really quick. This video is on our webpage. The first part of the video is the video that we used to launch the campaign back in 2020. And then the second part of the video is an update that we gave after we acquired the land that came out of that campaign. So I think it'll help if we watch this together and then I'm going to kind of fill in the blank with some more of the story. So let's watch this video. to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping, right before COVID changed the world forever. And even in the midst of the uncertainty, even though we had months at a time where we weren't meeting as a body in a building, the money continued to come in and God continued to provide. And from that campaign, we were able to purchase the land that I'm standing on right now at 7600 Litchford Road. I am standing in the future home of Grace Raleigh. In a few years time, there will be a building right here where I am. And I am so excited for this opportunity. Thank you. And from the very beginning, it's not been about building a building. To us, it's about taking the next step of obedience that we believe God wants us to take. We believe that it's God's will that there would be a building right here where I'm standing, that there would be children filling the hallways, and there would be people coming each week into this space to learn more about Jesus, to get loved closer to Him. We believe that God wants to put grace here in this community to share His love and spread His love and build His kingdom right here in this community. We hope this becomes a place where people hang out and gather, that it's used every day, and that people are connected to Jesus and connected to one another more and more here. It's our ardent prayer that generations of people who call grace home would be connected to Jesus here, would be connected to one another, and that from this place, we can love on this community for decades in the future. You know, what's fun is watching yourself age in real time in front of 200 of your closest friends. It's a year later and a year grayer and a year thinner, but that's how it goes. So that's roughly the background. To give you a little bit more details, because I want you to see how God's been with us every step of the way, this actually started. The dream of having a permanent home has been here since the beginning. It's always been the desire of the people of Grace that we would do this. Back in 2000 when we were founded as Grace Community Church. But we didn't have a time or a place where we could realize that dream. And then in the fall of 2018, we went on an elder retreat. And when we went on the elder retreat, two of our elders, Burt Banks and Bill Reith, who were here this morning, and were over there next door praying before the service like they do every week. They came to the elders and they said, hey, we've come up with a 10-year plan that we'd like to discuss. And the rest of the elders were like, okay, seems presumptuous, but what you got? And they laid out their hopes and dreams for grace. And part of that was, hey, it's high time we start to pursue a permanent home. And so out of that, we formed a campaign committee in 2019, chaired by Tom Proctor, and populated by some other people in the church to figure out how to go about this campaign. We determined that we needed to raise $1.5 million. This was pre-COVID, and so at the time, we genuinely believed that would get done everything that we thought we needed to get done to have a space. And we opened up our search. We were willing to buy another building or another church, move into a church that had moved out, anything like that. Everything was on the table, but we were tasked, the committee was, how do we raise the money? How should we go about the campaign? And we read a book by an expert who's done hundreds of campaigns all over the country and did the research that we felt like we needed to do. We talked to some other committees who had also done it. And the recommendation to the elders from our committee was that we needed to do a silent campaign first. And in a silent campaign, somebody, usually the senior pastor, sits down with the 10 to 15 most impactful givers in the church, the people with the highest capacity to give the most. And I would sit down with them and I would say, hey, listen, here's what we're going to do. I'd love for you to pray about being a part of that. And then make an ask. The book says that you're supposed to ask for three times what they give annually, which seems absurd to me. But that was the guidance. And so we go to the elders and we say, this is what we think we need to do. And the elders served us really well in that moment because they said essentially, absolutely not. That's not who we are as a church. That's not what we want to do. Let's just make an ask, one ask, and let everybody respond how they want to respond and trust the Holy Spirit to get this done. And I responded to that person by saying, that sounds great. Tomorrow, are you going to go walk through the forest and sing with the animals? Because that doesn't seem too practical. We have something we have to do here. And they kept pushing back on me and pushed back on the committee and they said this is how we think we need to do it one of the reasons I've come around to understanding that that was the exact right way to handle things is I've been very careful during this campaign to not value gifts based on amount but but we value gifts based on sacrifice. I would hate to have had a meeting with a high capacity giver and not have met with some of our young families who don't have the capacity to give like that just yet, but are sacrificing in order to do it. Who am I to say which party is making the greater sacrifice? So we don't want to differentiate the gifts based on amount. We just want everybody to participate. And so I'm so glad that we didn't go about it that way. So then in February of 2020, we had four weeks. It was a Grace is Going Home campaign. Four weeks capped off with a Pledge Sunday. And I talked about evangelism and discipleship. I didn't talk about the future. I talked about who we are as a church and what we want to be. Not in a building, but as a people. And then on March the 1st, we had Pledge Sunday. And we had sent everybody out cards and asked you to bring in your pledge card. And at the end of the service, we're going to submit them together. And we collected them in the offering baskets. The goal is to raise 1.5. I, in my prayers, was very hesitant that this was going to get done, a little bit doubtful. And I was just praying that God would make it clear. And my thought was, if we get 800,000 pledged, that'll be a pretty good indication from God that we're moving in the right direction and this is what we need to do. If we have 300,000 pledged, we'll know, well, mud in our eye, we're going to look stupid for this, but I guess we're not going to do it right now. But I wanted it to be clear. We had brought in Tom Ledoux, our wonderful finance director. He lives out of state, but we brought him in so that he could be there on Pledge Sunday and tally up the pledges. So Tom did that. So Sunday afternoon, March the 1st, he called me, and he told me that we had $1.3 million pledged, which absolutely blew me away. By the middle of the week, the pledges were up to $1.5 million. Exactly what we wanted. I couldn't believe it. March the 8th, I stood here, and I announced to all of us, this is what's been pledged. This is amazing. And we celebrate it as a church of what God was doing for us. March the 15th, we didn't meet again for two years because of COVID. And there was a lot of financial uncertainty at the beginning of COVID. It's the last thing in the world we're going to do while the stock market is spiraling and everyone's going to Walmart at five in the morning to try to get bread is email you and be like, by the way, you pledged $10,000. How's that coming along? So we didn't, we just let it lie because we didn't want to be obtuse and ridiculous. And even though we did very little to keep our focus on it during those two years of COVID, $1.6 million came in, not 1.5. What those campaign experts will tell you is you do the silent campaign, you do the silent ask, you do it strategically, then you just need to know your operating budget is going to suffer and you're only going to bring in about 80% of what is pledged, not grace, by not paying attention to it at all God brought in 1.6 million dollars we finished in the black every year once we had the money we assembled our building committee with a commercial banker to commercial real estate agents and some. And me, because I'm highly qualified for that. And we started conducting a search. We looked and we looked and we looked. And finally, Wes Ward, one of our elders, said, hey, I found some land. It's three slots of land put together that's being sold as a chunk. But it's not showing up on any commercial real estate sites. So the land that we have on Litchford is three individual homes. So it's three different plots. But a realtor bought the largest home or the largest plot and then convinced the other two neighbors to sell with him. And then he listed it. But he didn't list it commercial. So all the people that would scoop in and outbid us didn't know it was there. It's like God just gifted us this perfect parcel of land, surrounded by a new neighborhood that's going in, across the street from Northridge, surrounded by another neighborhood on our left, literally surrounded with homes. We are in the middle of a neighborhood. It's perfect. On a road we all know well. And we were able to acquire it in a whirlwind process in the summer of, I think, 22. It was amazing. And then we began the process of meeting with an architect. We formed another committee, because we're churches. We like committees. We formed another committee. It was important to me that we would get voices from every corner of the church, trusted people who wanted to speak into this, and we began the design process. And the building that you saw is the result of that process. And obviously my picture in that building is a really stupid joke because if I ever tried to actually do that, they would fire me that day. Okay, so that's not, we're not, if this is your first time with us, we're not that kind of church. And all along the way, we believed that God was with us. We believed that he was encouraging us to take this step as a body of believers. That this is what he wanted to do. We talk a lot at Grace about being step-takers. It's one of our values. It's one of our traits. It's the way we talk about discipleship. Everybody has a step of obedience that God wants them to take. It's our job to identify it and have the faith and courage to take it. We believe that this is the next step for grace to take as a body, as a church. This is our collective next step. We believed it then in 2018. We believed it in 2020 when we shared it with everybody, when we shared our dream. We believed that God was with us and it was what we were supposed to do as the money came in, even though we didn't ask for it. And we've believed it since we had to come back to you and go, hey, listen, the plan didn't go like we thought it was going to go. We need to raise an additional $2 million to be able to get this done, but we think we can do it. And so last fall, we launched another campaign and said, let's try to give this a two-year horizon and get over the hump. You've got your bulletins. On the back of it is just a little bit of financial information that basically tells you for all intents and purposes, we're about halfway home on that. But I'm talking to you about it this morning because just like we believed then that this is what God wants us to do, we continue to believe that now. We continue to believe that establishing a permanent home is the right thing for grace to do and that this is the right time to do it. If you were to ask me why, I think the most succinct, honest, compelling reason to me is the inadequacies of our current facility. You've never brought a single person to this church that said, you know, I don't know about the service and the people weren't very nice, but you got a beautiful facility. How many weddings do you do here a year? I've done two weddings here. Both of them happened whenever that hurricane came through about four or five years ago. It was, how long ago was it? It was your wedding. 2018. They got hurricaned out of their venue and so they came here that weekend. Those are the two weddings we've done in this space. This space and this location, God forgive me, we're grateful for it, stinks. It does. We all know it. Our location's terrible. We are not positioned geographically to reach the people that we're best equipped to reach. None of our neighbors come to church here. When we go to Litchford, a bunch of our neighbors are going to come to church here. This facade is awful. We're across from a big lot that I think is going out of business. Lord knows what's going to be over there now. We now have new neighbors. We had a fish store for years and we always laughed about walking past the aquarium store to get your children. And, and that was a big joke. Well now jokes on us. Cause you know, who's there now? Trim carpenters. You know what they do every day from 7.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.? They fabricate. They run a planer and a saw, and Aaron complains about it. Because you can't concentrate. And you can't even hear anything in the one meeting room. The large room that we have, that's our conference room slash children's space. You can't hear anything in there when they're fabricating. And when we are here, we're beholden to our landlord. Raise the rates, charge what they want, kick us out, sell to someone else who doesn't want a church as an occupant. We are not in control of our own future here. And when I think about the inadequacy of the space, I think about it for two groups of people. I think about it for us, for the grownups, and then I think about it for the kids. For us, I don't know if you know this, but every night of the week, Sunday through Thursday, people are meeting here. We are now full of small groups. We've had to ask favors of some small group leaders. We've had to rearrange some things. We've had to ask groups to change nights or to change times so that we can accommodate everybody who wants to use our space. And I was told that there's a large group that meets in here in the evenings and the lights are so dim that a lot of people have a hard time reading their notes and writing things down. And frankly, I don't want to dump several thousand dollars of money into an auditorium that we're leaving. So we're just going to let it be dim now. Use your phone like old people at a restaurant if you have to. I don't know if you know this, but I can't see Jason Ashburn anymore because I just moved behind the pole. How about a church without one of those? Does that sound nice? Every week we hear our kids. If you're on a committee, you know we have no place to meet. White tables, fold-out chairs, that's fine. We're not highfalutin around here. And that's not going to stop us from making disciples. But it does highlight the inadequacy of our space. I just mentioned about eight different committees. None of them had a good place to meet. I get really concerned for our kids. We are bursting at the seams with children now. One of the things that's so striking to me about Grace is going into COVID, February of 2020, about 12 to 13% of our Sunday morning attendance consisted of children 10 and younger. Do you know what it is now? 33. Last year, it was 25%. Now it's 33%. We'll have 130 people in this room, and we'll have 44 kids spread out throughout the rest of the church. We are out of space with our kids' ministry. If you have a toddler that you dropped off this morning, you dropped them off in what was a storage closet a month ago. See all this stuff? See all this junk over here? Look, have you ever noticed it? All this crud under sheets so you don't see it. We have no storage. We have tables tucked in things. We are crammed in every nook and cranny of this place. And we still have to throw things out left and right. Our fourth and fifth graders meet in this back room across from a dirty kitchen with chairs in the hallway and tables jamming things up. There's like this much space that you can just get in and then go to the door. If you have a child in second or third grade, they don't even have a space. They meet in the copy room. It wasn't until Facelift Sunday in September that we were able to move some things out of there to make more space for them and actually put a stinking decoration on the wall so it felt like they were in their own space on a Sunday morning. You know what's next? I'm not kidding around with this because we keep getting more kids. You know where they're going to start meeting after the next time we grow? When we can get some more volunteers. All we're waiting on is volunteers and then we're going to split a class and put them there. My office. My desk is against the wall. I have a whiteboard. I have a lot of space. We're going to start using the senior pastor's office for children's space. That's fine. I do not care. But here's what I know, is we don't want that experience for our kids. We want our children growing up in spaces that feel like they belong to them. We want enough space for our kids to be able to run around. Did you see in the video the playground on the outside? Do you think that they would like that more than this? Because right now, the auditorium doubles as a playground after church is done. They can't wait to come around and run in circles and smile and knock each other over. And it's awesome. It's one of my favorite things about Sunday morning is watching the chaos in here. But man, I'd love for them to have a playground. I would love to be able to do a Grace's Big Night Out at Grace. Did you see that outdoor space where there's going to be, there's a kitchen. And there's going to be a slide-up window for the kitchen so we can prepare things, bring it outside. There's going to be TVs. Small groups can gather there. People can hang out there. We can have parties there. We want people coming from the community to come play on our playground and sit there and talk to one another, even if they don't go to grace. We want those spaces. But the space that we have here is inadequate for who we want to be. It's inadequate for where we want to go as a church. And here's why I chose this psalm. Because I think it's a good thing for us to reflect on as we consider establishing a permanent home together. Here's a big reason why. Verses 3-5 of Psalm 127. Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court. Grace, our quiver is very full. We have a whole generation of kids that we're bringing up, teaching to be kingdom builders, to connect to Jesus and to connect to one another. I believe we have a responsibility to them. I believe it's solemn and sacred. And I know that many of us, we've already raised our kids. But this is an opportunity for those who have adult children now to leave a legacy here too. I want my children's children playing on that playground. I want people who never knew us and never met us to come together and worship God there. I want it to be a footprint, a stamp in North Raleigh where God's kingdom goes out from and comes to. We have an opportunity to do something really special. And I hope that we'll do it. Here's another reason why. When I say our facilities are inadequate for what we want to accomplish, I also mean that they actively turn people away. We have friends, Jen and I do. Not a lot, but we have some. We have friends that we invited here. Come to our church. And they came. And they loved it. They loved our people. They got involved in a small group for a short time. But eventually, they stopped coming. And we didn't know why, and I never press. When people come and then they don't, I have the hardest time reaching out to them. I don't want to make anybody feel bad or awkward or weird. But we were able to talk to them. Jen was able to talk to the mom. And the mom just said, yeah, I love it. I wish we would go, but my husband just says it doesn't feel like a church. He just doesn't want to be at a place that feels like that. And listen, I think that's stupid, okay? I don't accept that as an adequate reason. It's immature. However, we can never mature him in Christ if our building prohibits that. This space is a hurdle for people that have to, they have to overcome it to want to be a part of grace. And I know that you have friends too that you've invited that have said to you because you've told me, yeah, great people, incredible pastor, okay worship, but it doesn't feel like church. Let me know when y'all get a building. Those kids, listen, my friends' kids should be in church every week. They should be making friends with other people who love Jesus, whose parents love Jesus. They should be getting discipled. They should be taught by our wonderful volunteers. That couple should be getting Jesus poured into their life every week. They should be coming and worshiping with us. The Holy Spirit should be working on them, making them more like Christ in character and sanctifying them. That family needs a church. Every family needs a church. I don't think every family needs grace. I'm not trying to make that point, but I think every family needs a church. And that family doesn't have a church right now because the one that they feel closest to and most connected with isn't working for them because our facilities are prohibitive for them. This space is causing us to not do all that we could, to not be all that we can be. It's keeping us from walking the path that we believe God wants for us. So I think it's time for us to get this done. And here's the thing. I've been very passive about this campaign. I was passive about it in COVID. Didn't put it in front of us. We don't have a thermometer in the lobby. I'm not sending out emails. We're not saying, hey, you've pledged this much and given this much, just letting you know. We're not putting it in front of people. I don't talk a lot about the campaign, even in Discover Grace, where we still continue to grow. I know we have a lot of young families, but if you come to Discover Grace, what you'll see is we continue to maintain this generational diversity that is wonderful and characteristic of grace. But you don't hear me talking about the campaign a lot. I have people who care deeply about it that get mad at me and tell me that I need to talk about it more. Why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't you asking people, what are we doing? I have to get it. I have to get the business about three times a year from some folks. The passive approach to the campaign has been intentional. It's not because I'm scared to talk about it. It's not because I forget. It's not because I don't think it's important. There's two big reasons why I've been passive. Well, there are three. The first is when we did the campaign, when we launched it originally, we chose a passive tact. The Holy Spirit did it. It worked. And so I learned from that. And thought, that's what we should continue to do. But two bigger reasons are one, me. I've never wanted it to be about my ego. I've never wanted it to be about what I got done. I don't know if you know this, but a big notch in the belt of a pastor is to take a church from a non-permanent facility to a permanent facility. A big notch in the belt, a big career milestone for guys like me and women is to take a church into a building into its very first one. That's a big accomplishment. And I abhor the idea of making this about me, of asking you to give your money to the kingdom of Nate. And so I have stayed intentionally as far away from it as I can because I don't want my ego involved. I don't want it to be about me. I don't want it to feel like something I am doing. I want it to be something that we are doing. I want it to be something that the Holy Spirit has stirred in us to do. I want it to be something that we come together collectively and don't make it about our egos either. Make it about what we believe God wants us to do. The biggest reason I've been passive is because I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball. I felt like as a church, we had bigger fish to fry than building a building and getting a permanent home. We needed to make disciples. We needed to grow in our youth ministry and our children's ministry. We need a strong small groups ministry where people grow and spiritual health flourishes. And I didn't want for a second for us to start to think that building a building is the most important thing that we can do as a church, not with all this other hard work to do. And so I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball and make it something that it's not. But here's what I think now, and here's why we're talking about this. In light of our health, we have a healthy staff team. Our staff team's great. I love every one of them. I think they love me. They tell me they do, just like my mom. We have a very healthy staff culture. We have the right people in the right places, and to my knowledge, no one's going anywhere for a long while. We have a healthy elder board. We disagree well. I won't say what it was about, but a few months back, we had the most contentious elder meeting I've ever been in. We were voting on an issue that was important to us. There was disagreement there. It was the most fractured vote that there's ever been. And let me tell you something. You should like this. My team lost. The senior pastor did not steamroll the elders. They are unsteamrollable. They're healthy. And they push back. And then we left that contentious meeting where we did not agree. And we agreed. And we were fine. And there was no calls to be made afterwards because someone got upset or their feelings hurt. We're healthy on the elder board. Our student ministry is flourishing. Finally. Kyle, God bless him, he's at home visiting his nana or baba right now. One of the two. I don't know. And so he's not here this morning. But y'all, he worked so hard over COVID. And we have a youth group now that's growing and flourishing and thriving. I've already told you we're bursting at the seams with our kids ministry. Aaron's done a phenomenal job with that and with our volunteers. We have healthy small groups. Our discipleship pathway is in place. We know that we're supposed to be disciples of Christ. We know that we're designed to be kingdom builders. We've installed our five traits. We've reminded you of those. We are ready to go. And so in light of all that health, I think now is the time to take our collective focus and put it on getting this thing done and getting into this building. It's time for that last half of the two million to come in. So here's what I'm going to ask of you. If you have been faithfully giving towards the campaign from the very start, you filled out your pledge card in 2020, or you made your donation in 2020, and you've been doing end of year stuff, and you've been hitting your pledge. Just keep doing that. Just keep it up. We're so grateful. We're so grateful. I'm not asking you for another thing, okay? I would ask us all, as we think about end-of-year giving this year, I know that many of us are in the habit of giving money at the end of the year for different reasons. I would love for you to consider the building campaign as a target for your end-of-year giving, whatever that might be for you. I also want to talk to another group of people in the church and do this as delicately as I can. I've had some of you, and I've heard from other people that have taken this posture. We're going to give to the campaign. We believe in this. We're going to do this. I am going to do this, whatever your case is. But I'm going to wait until we get a little bit closer to the finish line because that money is parked in a place where it's making eight or 10% right now. And it's best for everyone to just leave it there to accrue as long as possible. Fine. Fine. I understand that. I do not have a financial mind. I'm not going to advise for or against that. I have no idea. But if that's you, I want to ask you a favor. The first time we did the campaign, somebody from the church wanted to meet with me. They met with me and they said, hey, listen, we have decided that we're going to give X amount of dollars to the campaign. We're're gonna give it at this increment every year for the next three or five years But if at some point you get close to the finish line and you want to call on it to get us there you can and so once we got within that range of money I Text texted him a GIF of someone from 30 Rock, or from Parks and Rec, saying, money please. And they wired it over. If that's you, if you have an amount that you know you want to give, you guys have talked about it, you've prayed about it, but you're just holding back until we're a little bit closer because of where it's sitting. I understand all of that. But if that's you, would you have that conversation that my friend had with me? Would you have that with Tom Ledoux? Would you email him? He's our finance director, finance at gracerolly.org. If you need to know how to get in touch with him, I can help you out with that. But if that's you, would you just tell him that so that we know once we get close, we have X amount that's going to get us there? The other group of people I want to talk to are the folks that have come since 2020, since we started the campaign. You weren't here for the beginning. You've never pledged, nor should you have. But you've started coming here now and now Grace is home. I would love for you to consider getting involved with this campaign. I would love for you to consider partnering us and letting us walk together to do this because I believe that the whole church needs to galvanize around this. Even if we had somebody who said, you know what, I want to give it all. I would say, I don't know that that's a good idea because I think that we need to come around this as a church and as a body together. So if you're newer to grace and you've never given, I would love for you to consider doing that. And if you've never given to grace, and I know all the different reasons why we might hesitate to do that, and it takes a long time to believe in a place enough to start giving that part of our resources to it, that's fine. But if you've never given and you feel compelled to begin, what I would love for you to do is begin to give to the building campaign. Get in the habit of giving. And then once we get there and we're going and we're building, keep giving that but give it to operational. So that's the ask that I'm making of you. Pray, please, about what you might do at the end of this year if you're inclined to give in that way. If you have an amount you want to give, can you kind of flag that for us and let us know? And then if you've never given to grace, maybe this is a good time to start. But now is the time to get this thing done. And I want to end it this way. I love the beginning of this psalm. 127. Because it says this, What Solomon says here is if the Lord's not in it, what's the point? If we build a church and God's not in it, what's the point? It's why I took the time to walk you through the process that's gotten here because I want you, like me, to be able to see God's hand in all of these things and to have confidence and faith that he continues to remain with us. So what we're going to do is we're going to pray, but we're going to pray differently than we have since I've gotten here. I've never done anything like this, so I'm just going to ask you to trust me and go with me. But I want us to pray together. I want us to make a statement of unanimity as we believe this is our focus. So I'm going to come down here and I'm going to invite up a couple of groups of people. The first group I'd like to join me up here are current elders. So if you're a current elder, if you'd please come stand with me, I would appreciate that greatly. The next group that I'd love to come stand with us is former elders. If you've ever served the church as an elder, if you've ever been asked by your peers to lead us, would you come join us? And now I'd like to see the people who were here in 2000 at the beginning of this dream. If you were here in 2000, would you come up, just stand around the perimeter. We'll expand out. Stay right here. And now the rest of us who call grace home, who believe in this step, I'm going to invite you to stand, find somebody, touch people on the wall. But I want us to hold hands together. Can we do that? Stand up, find someone's hand to hold. And let's have a moment where we pray together. Wonderful. Please pray with me. Father, we thank you for this church. We thank you for what it means to us. We thank you for the people that you've brought here, for the love that fills this room and the lobby and these hallways every weekend. We thank you for a rich community that you've brought us. And we thank you that we get to be the light that shows Jesus to other people in our community. God, we pray for grace. We pray for your blessing on us. We ask God earnestly that you would galvanize us around this goal of getting into this building. Bring in the last million dollars, Father. Bring it in quick. Let us go. We're itching. God, may each one of us consider in our hearts and in our families what you would have us do as we seek to accomplish this together. And we know, God, that if you are not in it, it doesn't matter. So show us your presence in this process. God, help us to do our part as you promised to do yours. We pray all these things together in your son's name. Amen. All right, guys, thank you so much for coming. Have a great week. We will see you next week for a normal service with a sermon and everything.

Good morning, Grace. I'm David. I'm one of the elders here,. The Lord will keep you from all harm. He will watch over your life. The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore. Well, good morning, Grace. I am Erin. I get the honor of being one of the pastors here. And I am going to channel a little. I didn't do it. It wasn't me. I'm going to channel a little Nate, maybe that's what it was, that's what the, you know. I'm going to channel a little Nate right now and tell you that I am so excited to be here with you today that I get the opportunity to introduce our new sermon series and it's my favorite. But in all actuality, it is. As a staff, we gather periodically to kind of plan out sermon series as we look at semesters that are coming. And for like the last four years, I have come with my little sheet of ideas, and I pitched this one. I promise it's not me. I pitched this one every single year and it goes up on the whiteboard and it gets looked at and everybody says like, yeah, we could do that. We think it and then we get down to the cuts at the end and it always gets wiped off the board and so until this last time all of a sudden it was it stayed on the board and we get to do it and then Nate comes to me and says hey would you like to be the one that actually gets to introduce the sermon series and and then also speak on your favorite one and I was like, yes, that's fantastic. So it is a banner day for me and I will try to contain my excitement. There's just no guarantee. So hang on if it gets a little over the top. But for the next seven weeks, we as a church get to journey together through what are known as the Songs of Ascent. The Bible itself contains 150 different psalms. And towards the back of the psalms, number 120 to 135 to be exact, are little psalms, and I say little because they're shorter, but they actually bear a second heading of Song of Ascent. These psalms were written as reminders to the Israelites of their past, of their history, of the faithfulness of God to them in the midst of their seasons of despair and hopelessness. They were used during all of the pilgrimages that were taken as they went from their places outlying to Jerusalem for the feasts. So it was a road trip of sorts. And I know everyone in here at some point in time has taken a road trip, I'm going to assume. If you've taken a road trip with children, it was a testing period. Just saying, testing of sanity and testing of quite possibly every single one of the fruits of the spirit. And if you came out the end of the road trip with at least one of those still intact, count it as a win. Just count it as a win. It's a good thing. But I remember as a kid taking road trips with my family. We lived in an area that we were a couple of hours away from relatives. And so we would pile into the station wagon. Yes, I will date myself. We would pile into the station wagon. Mom and dad had the front, my brother had the middle, and I had the back. Because it was kind of like little fiefdoms. And there was this need to keep peace in the kingdom. You must separate the two children because if not, it was the constant, you know, she looked at me the wrong way. And then the fighting ensued. So I took over the back. I had my pillow. I had my book. I had my flashlight. And away we went. And the flashlight was to read at night, of course. It was also to irritate my brother with, but I never admitted to that one. But it was a good thing. Nowadays, though, when these kids pile into the vans that they're taking on road trips with their parents, they have switches. For those of you of a different generation, it's not a piece of wood that your parents used to threaten you with. A switch is actually a video game. There's iPads, and then there's headphones. That is a gift from God to the parents as well because the parents have them also. So it's a good thing. It's peace in the kingdom, remember. That's what we all want. But the one thing that I know that's happening inside of those headphones now and was happening inside of my station wagon years ago and even further back was there was always music. There was always song. The genre changed depending upon who was in the car. But there was song. And to me, song and music is just food for the soul. And so for the Israelites, these Psalms of ascent were their music. These Psalms were a way for them to prepare their hearts as they took that journey to be in the presence of God in Jerusalem. They also used these psalms in a continued way to get closer to God. Once they got to Jerusalem, there were 15 steps that went from the outer court to the inner court of the temple. And so they would stop on the first step and they would sing. They would pause. They would move to the next step. They would sing another song. Remember, there's 15 steps. There's 15 songs. God's good that way. He just is. It's nice and orderly. And I know to a lot of you all, though, you went, I'm going to stop and I'm going to sing. And then I'm going to take another step and then I'm going to sing wrong. I'm going to take them two by two and I'm going to be the first one to the top. I know there's a competitive spirit in here. I have been with you all on many occasions. But yes, this is one of those really cool times for us where scripture makes an invitation. It invites us to slow down, to think very deeply about the story of God. And it's an opportunity for us to reframe our mindset, to orient our hearts, and to direct our steps toward God and who we are in him. And so this morning when I got to pick my psalm, Psalm 121 is the direction I felt I wanted to go and to look at the question, where does my help come from? And then especially in light of the society that we live in today that has entire marketing plans and TV shows out there all about the help that we need, even though we personally think we have it all together. Right? So if I gave you the little jingle, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there, right? He's there to help the minute you need it. Or not too terribly long ago, Zoe, my daughter, introduced me to a random show on Netflix. It's called Alone. They take 10 survivalists and drop them in I don't even know where back I don't know what it's called it's like way up in the upper back part of Canada where they get to deal with weather and bears and moose and all of this stuff and they are dropped by themselves on an island with a thing of bear spray and a satellite phone. And their whole objective is to stay there the longest. They want to be the last one to actually pick up that phone and call for help. And if they do, they win. They don't know what their other friends are doing. So it's a competition in their brain at this point in time to see how long they can last. But that's the, let's just push a button. Once we push, once we've exhausted all of our resources and we think that we're going to have to call for help, we finally push that button and get their help. And isn't that just like us? Because we believe the lies of the world that tell us that we're strong enough, that we can do it all by ourselves. We are so capable. Just keep trying. Just keep striving. Just keep doing all the things. And I am wired as a helper. For those of y'all that know personality traits, that's mine. I'm a helper. And helpers don't ask for help. We don't like to. It goes against every part of our being. Let's just put it that way. It's kind of like the toddler that says, I do it myself. Like that's, that is very much me. And if anybody has walked with me or been around me over the last couple of years, you saw a lot of this, I do it myself and stubbornness as I walked a journey with aging parents. I specifically remember a time when I knew my dad needed some help. I said he needed the help, right? He's trying to take care of mom. He needs to get out. It's time for you to do some help. I arranged for him to have some help so he could get out and play golf. The people come and he's talking to them and this is great. Thank you so much. We'll be in touch. They leave. He turns around and looks at me, and he says, thanks so much for doing that, but I don't need any help. Like father, like daughter, I come by it naturally. But you know what? Then there was a medical issue, so then we had to call the help in because he couldn't do what he needed to do, and so guess what? I won. I did. I won. It was me. And over the course of the next few years, the same, those little things would happen. I'd exert my help and eventually it would get used and all was good. Um, little victories here and there until it wasn't until my feet got taken out completely from underneath me. And this was May of this past year in 2024. My mom had died in December of 2022. My dad was here. All was good. He was having a great time, living his best life. We were enjoying our time with him. And then last spring we had some issues. We had a couple health falls. We had a couple falls. The last fall ended us up in the ER. Scan reveals four broken ribs and a compression fracture, which mind you, they also say, oh, that wasn't caused by this ball. It had to have, tough old bird. That's all I got to say, tough old bird. But then they also proceed to say, oh, well, wait, his white blood cell count is exceptionally high, so we think there's an infection. And then, oh, his cardiac enzymes have gone up too, and we're not sure why, because they continue to climb. Excuse me, stop, wait. Two weeks ago, we had a physical. This was the healthiest 90-year-old you've ever met. What has just happened? My feet are gone. And all I wanted in that moment was for the weight that had just been dropped on my shoulders to be lifted off. It needed to go away. I wanted to push that button and have it just disappear. I wanted to hit rewind and go back two weeks when the doctor said it's the healthiest 90-year-old he'd ever seen. What is this? And so as I continued to read through Psalm 121 in preparation, the first verse, this, I lift my eyes to the mountains from where does my help come? It spoke directly to even the residual, exhausted, scared, unsure, weary daughter. And so when we look at that verse that says, I lift my eyes to the mountains, we're starting with the Israelites on the beginning of their journey towards Jerusalem. They're standing and they're looking towards Jerusalem in these moments. And they're surrounded by these huge mountains. This is one of those places where scripture asks us to stop, though. You're preconceived a notion about mountain. What does it say? They're strong. They're stable. They're majestic. And to the Israelites, it also could have meant that they were this promise of Mount Zion and the meeting of the presence of God. But what happens if I also said to you, these mountains were anything but friendly? They look up. So first of all, that tells you they're going to start climbing. Everything they did was by foot. It's rocks, it's pebbles, it's obstacles that they're having to climb. It's hot and it's full of twists and turns and blind corners and around every blind corner is a robber waiting for these pilgrims as they make their way into Jerusalem. Not the picture that we have in our brain. And then to add to all of that physical part, there's also a whole line of temptation. Because on the tops of some of these hills sit altars, altars set up to false gods. So you are in this place of hopelessness and despair. You are headed towards the presence of your God. And yet, somewhere in the middle, there's this offer of, you having trouble with your crops? Come see the God of rain. He'll fix it. You having trouble with infertility? Oh, oh, well, wait a second. The God of fertility is right here. Just make a stop right here. Drop your offerings here. It's simpler. You don't have to keep climbing. We're going to stop right here. It'll be all better. And the thing is, is that, yeah, it might be for a minute. It might be just in the middle of that for a second. You've kind of offloaded it so it feels a little bit better. But that instant gratification only leads to further despair. Counterfeit gods are not going to get us what we need. And isn't this just like our journey as Christians, as disciples of Christ? We aren't promised easy. We aren't promised this easy little path. No, no, no. We're promised an uphill climb. We're promised obstacles and rocks and stones in our way. We're promised weird things around corners that might take our feet out from underneath us. It's what we're promised. We also have the temptations that we face too, right? We face whatever it is at this moment for you. The temptation to give it away to an instant gratification. And the thing is, though, our goal is eternal. And so we cannot sacrifice tomorrow's joy on today's pleasure. We just can't. What we need to do is we need to focus on the eternal. And that's what the next verse actually says to us. Because if we pass over those counterfeit gods, if we don't allow the temptations to get to us, the thing that we have waiting is that my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. And the really cool part here, y'all, is Lord is capitalized in the Hebrew that the name of God here is Yahweh, which is the I am is the all-powerful and the one with all authority so the one that created the mountains and the earth and who created you and who created me is our button he's our satellite phone he is our help at all times. But why is it so difficult for us to get our gaze above what is sitting here and tempting us? Why is it so hard for us to look past the things around us in this world? Well, we live in a broken world. That's probably the easiest answer to this. And the world wants us to do absolutely nothing but focus on our circumstances and how awful it is. Because that keeps our head down here and not on him. You know, you see the news today and it is all about the devastation from two hurricanes. It's all of the crazy that is involved in an election cycle. It could also be there's something happening inside of your marriage. It could be a medical diagnosis that you've recently received. Or maybe it's one that you've had for a while that just won't change. Maybe it's your marriage. Maybe it's a prodigal kid. Maybe it is somehow you're involved in school and you're just done and you want to give up. The world convinces us to stay in those moments. Because guess what? Remember, I do it myself. You can fix it. If you stay focused on it, you can fix it. But how tired are we in trying to do it ourselves and constantly striving in all these moments to fix it? I don't know about y'all, but we're exhausted. I'm exhausted. And so when I sat in that hospital room, done, exhausted, spinning, all of the what ifs, not knowing what was going on with my dad, there was a moment when I just kind of said, I'm done. And it was as if God reached down and took my chin and he lifted it all the way up and said, your gaze is wrong. Your gaze needs to be on me, not on what's going on around you. Now my circumstance at that moment, nothing changed with my dad, but what did change was that now my source of strength was not me. I was not looking into my own for my source of strength. I knew very much that every bit of patience and strength and the ability to put one foot in front of the other was coming directly from him. And David was very sweet to us to read the entire psalm. And there's one of the verses in the psalm where God refers to himself as our keeper. And I just love this moment and what it implies. Because to me, it implies a level of care and a level of attention that only comes from love. It can only come from a place of love. We are his beloved. And when we suffer, when we're in pain, he's in pain also. And Psalm 91 verse 4 is a beautiful picture to me of this idea of keeper. And it says that he will cover you with his feathers and under his wings you will find refuge and his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. Thank you. So y'all, he's watching us. So in those moments like me sitting in the hospital, he saw me in my moment of need. He's going to protect us from the harshness of the circumstances around us. He's going to try his best to protect us from the fears and those anxieties that creep in in those quiet moments. He's our place of retreat when the world around us just feels like it's way too much. And so I look back over the course of those last couple of weeks and all of the stuff that was going on with my dad, and I can now, you know, hindsight's 20-20, right? You can go back and I can see God's hand offering so much of his provision and so much of his protection with every step that I took. And so often that provision and that protection came in the people that he put in my path. There was a time when dad was at, I call it Little Wake Med, so the one that's over there on Durant. Because of all this weird cardiac stuff, they moved him to Big Wake Med. We had a little brief moment of, he had had some mental decline due to all the medications. Adjusted medications, his sweet little personality came back out. We got him settled at Big Wake Med. And it was a good night. I left because he kicked me out. But I left. I came home. And not, I don't know, a little bit later, I received this random text. Kind of out of the blue. And all it said was, I just visited your dad. And he's smiling and he's cracking jokes. Sleep well. The text was from Connor Brannon, who is a friend of a lot of people here at Grace and someone whom I call a friend as well. And it was an amazing gift to me to know that Connor's at the hospital while my dad's there. And then the next night, and dad had had a horribly rough day, and Connor checked on him that night and just let me know that he was finally resting. He was like, you can rest too. Thank you. It was just a good thing. And then a few hours later is when I received the call that my dad was on the decline. Things had changed very rapidly. And as we headed to the hospital, it was Connor who met us in the room just after my dad had passed. It was Connor who hugged us. It was Connor who prayed with us. And it was Connor who offered the most beautiful words of encouragement to a girl who had just lost her daddy. That, my friends, is God's providence and God's provision wrapped up in human form. And there's nothing more beautiful than that. And so as I look, this will forever be for me a moment marked in time of God's faithfulness to me and to my family to have provided Connor in those moments. We don't do this by ourselves. The Israelites didn't walk their paths alone either. They started out together. They moved along these mountain paths. They met up with other pilgrims. They supported each other. They loved on each other. And they knew the verses out of Ecclesiastes that talk very specifically about two being better than one. And if one falls down, the other one's there to help them up. And it also goes on to say, pity who falls but has no one to help them up. We were never meant to walk this spiritual journey alone. This journey of faith is not supposed to be done alone. Who are your people? Who do you walk with? Who do you trust to reach down and pick you up when you fall? Who do you trust to be the most vulnerable with and say, this situation stinks and have them look at you and go, yeah, it does. But guess what? I got you and so does God. Those are the people we need in our lives. This past weekend, I got to go to the beach with my girlfriends. These were my college girlfriends and I will not tell you how long it's been since I was in college. So let's just say it had been a few years had passed. But these were girls that I had done life with for at least four years and then quite a few years after. We had been in each other's weddings. We had rocked babies together, all of the things. And then I moved. I'm the only one. I left Kentucky, but I will say I came to the promised land. So it's been good. But I left. They all stayed in and around the Lexington area and they've kept in touch really well. They do monthly brunches. They do all the things. They include me periodically on a group text, which is great fun. And so we've kept up with each other. And then just, I don't know, a couple months ago, random group text comes out. Next thing you know is within less than a week's period of time, we have planned a weekend at the beach, and they're coming here. Six of them are going to journey from Kentucky to Topsail just to make sure that they could pick me up along the way. And so the minute we all got together, the room is just full of love and laughter and some tears. And the years that had gone in between had washed away. And while they had walked together, not everyone's stories were known. And so we took time and we shared and we held each other's stories and we talked about hard marriages and we talked about even harder divorces and custody issues. We talked about cancer battles. We talked about seasons with kids that were hard. Even one of them now is raising her seven-year-old grandchild. We talked about harder seasons of aging parents, Alzheimer's, hospice, and then grief that comes from losing a parent. And even for a few of us, this feeling of being an orphan when you've lost two parents suddenly. But then we also got to talk about weddings and we got to talk about grandbabies and we got to talk about new marriages and love that they didn't know still existed. And happiness that they didn't know was still possible. And so often in these moments, these conversations circled back to God and his faithfulness to provide and to protect during all of these journeys. And the acknowledgement that these journeys were hard, but out of that acknowledgement came this place of gratitude. This place of saying, like, I am so grateful that I got to walk it with him. And now that I'm on the other side, I can honestly say I'm better for having done it. Wouldn't want to do it without him, but I'm definitely better for having done it. So as we sat in these moments and we cried and we laughed until our faces hurt, something settled in my bones. Something that I didn't realize until I sat in that room. And that was how much my soul needed those girls in that moment. But you know what? My God knew that that's what I needed. And out of his kindness to me, that's what he gave my sweet, weary heart was that time of rest and love and reflection with six of the most amazing women that I am privileged and honored to call my friends. Y'all, our God is also a steadfast friend to us. We can trust him with our problems. We can trust him with our failures, with our lives. And we know and we can know with all certainty. And I say that again, we can know with all certainty that he'll be there with his hands outstretched, ready to help us. He's going to cover us with those feathers. He's going to be on constant watch so that we can rest. He's going to be our shade. And the one that I love the most is when the world just gets to be too much and we're ready to say, I'm done. He's going to carry you. We just have to be willing to look up. And I said this in the note, in the grace fund, but I think it bears repeating. That our prayer is that through our sacred journey in which God has encountered through places and people and situations that we are changed. We invite you to join us in this season. Invite you to slow down, to open your Bible, to take a look at these Psalms. Read them slowly and prayerfully and obediently. And don't look just to gather information or check a box. Pray, read, and allow the Holy Spirit to do his thing, which is change. And I would also say, don't forget to look up. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you for your goodness. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you for loving us. It is a privilege and it is an honor to be yours. So in these times and this craziness that is the season that we live in, we ask that you slow us down. We ask that you give us the opportunity to pray, to read, and to most importantly look up. Look up past the distractions. Look up past all the things that the world wants for us to grab our attention and to focus our gaze on you. And Lord, we love you. It's in your name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and every now and again, as your pastor, and as a part of Grace, I just kind of get overwhelmed at how good God is to us. So this isn't the sermon, but one of my favorite parts about communion is just getting to see everybody walk by, and I get to know names and stories. And Jen commented to me, we've got about five very pregnant girls in the church right now. And each of those babies was prayed for fervently and is being prayed over. And what a blessing it is to see that happening. Bert, I'm about to start crying. If you could get me some tissues from the coffee bar, that would be great. I'm being serious, Bert. Snap to it, please. We've got folks in the church fighting cancer with relentless faith, recovering from strokes with faith. We've got faces, thank you, sir, that I'm happy to see every week, including birds. We've got tremendous friends and friendships and communities. And we are just tremendously blessed. We are chock full in our children's spaces. We are parking people at big lots. And it's just an exciting time to be a part of grace. And it's also a humbling time to be a part of grace in this community. So I just wanted to express that and hope that you feel it too. I also wanted to pray at the beginning of my sermon, so this kind of works out, because we've got a team going to Mexico Saturday. How many years have we had a relationship with faith ministry? A lot of years, decades. We've got some really sweet relationships down there. Unidos, unidos. Right, Jeff? He's got the t-shirt on. How many people are going this year? Okay. So we're going to pray for them. We're going to express some gratitude for grace. We're going to pray for the families that are about to grow. And we're going to pray for those fighting hard through difficult times. And then I'm going to try to get it together and give you the sermon I'm supposed to give you this morning. So let's pray. Father, we're grateful for this place and this family. Me, maybe most of all, this morning. We thank you for the love that's represented here. We thank you for the young women who are about to be young mamas and the young men who are about to be fathers. God, we thank you for those in our midst who are fighting hard with faith through challenges that they did not foresee and do not welcome and yet embrace as a part of a journey for you. We thank you for the growth that we see in our children and our children's ministries. And we just pray, God, more than anything, that we would be good stewards of those young souls for the time that they are entrusted to us. And I pray the same thing over everyone else that calls Grace home, that we would take good care of the folks that you have entrusted to us. We lift up our team going to Mexico and we just pray that you would continue to further those relationships and that those who are going would be moved towards you and that those who are going for the first time would be indelibly impacted by what happens there. In Jesus' name, amen. Alright, let's try this again. Run the bumper again. Let's just do that for funsies. I'm being serious. Do it. I'm going to mute my mic and blow my nose, and then we're going to have like an actual sermon. All right? Thank you. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This morning we are finishing up our series called The Traits of Grace where we're answering the question, if you're a partner of grace, which we don't have partners, we have members. We walked through that for a week. So if you're confused, you can listen to that sermon. If you're a partner of grace, this is what we want you to become. This is what we're trying to build you into. If you were to ask what should define someone who's been a partner of grace for many years, it would be these five traits that we've been walking through for the last five weeks. And so this week we arrive at what I believe to be the ultimate trait of a partner of grace. I think all the other traits build to this one. And so I'm just going to come right out the gates with it. If you're taking notes, you can write this down. At Grace, we are kingdom builders. At Grace, we are kingdom builders. We've got these five traits now emblazoned on the wall over the glass doors and the windows out in the lobby. As you walk out the center door, the one in the dead center on purpose is kingdom builders. This is something that we want every person at Grace to become. And this idea of being kingdom builders began to germinate for me about a decade ago in a staff meeting at my previous church called Greystone Church. Greystone is a church in suburban Atlanta. It's one of these kind of big multi-campus churches where you get simulcast out to multiple campuses when you preach, that kind of deal. And we took a staff retreat down to a lake house. And there's about 25 or 30 of us. And we're sitting in this brainstorming session where the lead pastor, Jonathan, who in many ways has been very gracious with me over the years. We're sitting in this brainstorming meeting where he's asking this question about Greystone. What defines people at our church? What do we want to instill in them? What defines us as people? What's in our DNA? And I kind of broke in and raised my hand and I said, I think we need to build a church of kingdom builders. And I kind of explained why I thought that, which is going to be some of the things that I explain to you in a minute. And Jonathan, like he listened to me. He was kind. He goes, yeah, that's great. That is super important. And then he didn't write it on the whiteboard. And I don't know if you've been in those meetings, those brainstorming meetings where you have an idea, you feel like it's a good idea, you say it, and whoever's in charge of the meeting goes, that is good. That is very good. Thank you so much for sharing that. Does anybody else have any ideas? And it doesn't go on the whiteboard. And when that happens, it's infuriating. And I know because I watch my staff get angry with me when I don't put their ideas on the whiteboard. When you do that, it hurts a little bit. So I thought maybe he didn't understand me right. So a few minutes later, I kind of approach it in a different way. You know, I'm nothing if not persistent. And he's like, yes, that's a good idea. Not right now. And then we move on again. And I thought maybe, I know, I know what'll do it. And so I explained it in a different way and because this is a Mike Tomlin's he's a coach of the Steelers he says that young young people getting involved in their profession have all the ideas and none of the responsibility that was me I had all the ideas and have any of the responsibility of execution so I mentioned it again until finally he said, Nate, we've heard you. It's a great idea. That's not going to work with what we're doing. We don't need to talk about that anymore. Okay. That's kind of what it takes sometimes for me to hear you. So I said, okay. But I couldn't let go of this idea that this seems so clear to me. And then about, I would say, seven years after that, I'm in a meeting at my church with my staff asking the same question. What are the traits of grace? What's important to us? What do we want to produce and who do we want to become? And I hadn't thought about it in a while, but it occurred to me. And so I said, hey, I just want to throw this out there. I think we were meant to be kingdom builders. And I explained why. And the staff responded enthusiastically. Yeah, that's good. Put that up there. And I know that often when there's someone leading a meeting and there's people who work for that person, that they are incented to support the ideas of that person. So that might not be authentic. But I will also tell you, and Aaron Gibson's in here somewhere. He will tell you if I'm lying, that sometimes I present ideas in staff meetings and it's just met with crickets. Just uncomfortable silence because no one wants to tell me it's a bad idea. And I go, okay, that didn't get any traction. We won't do that one. So I do feel like I can trust him. And then I presented it to the elders and the elders liked it too. So that became one of our traits, kingdom builders. Then maybe about a year after that, I was in a conversation that I believe I've told you guys about before with someone who was going to become a very good friend. And this guy was pressing me on grace and on my leadership. And he was saying, what do you want for grace? What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be true of grace in five years, ten years? What's your vision for grace? What's your vision for your leadership? What do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of you in five years, ten years? And I answered by saying, well, I've had these experiences in the past and I don't want to replicate those for people who work with me or for people who come to church with me. I've seen church do these things. I don't want to do those things. And after a while, he stopped me and he said, I've heard a lot about what you don't want to be, but I have no idea what you do want to be. And I realized in that moment that I had really never had a greater vision for grace than simply being healthy. And that grace required a greater vision than that. So I chewed on that for months. And finally, I came to this conclusion that this is why this idea has been germinating all along. Because I believe that grace needs to be filled with people who are passionate about building God's kingdom. I believe that the best work that we can do is to produce people who want to spend their lives building the kingdom of God with every ounce of energy that they have. And really what I would say is I want to produce a church full of people who are or are becoming John the Baptist. I want to produce people who have the same mindset that John the Baptist had, who are becoming more and more like John the Baptist in practice. And here's what I mean. Jesus called John the Baptist the greatest man ever born of a woman, which means Jesus thinks that John the Baptist is the greatest man to ever live. That's an incredible statement and a remarkable stance, and it's worth wondering why does Jesus think that, and I think, I think that this is why. John the Baptist, about 30 AD, was an elite rabbi that was allowed to have disciples. So I don't know how much you know about Jewish culture and Jewish context, but at this time in history, in Judaism, the rabbis were the pastors. Rabbi simply means teacher. And there was presumably hundreds of rabbis in Jerusalem at the time of John the Baptist, but there was this elite class of rabbis, the best of the best, that were allowed to have disciples, and John the Baptist was one of these elite rabbis because we see him having disciples with him. And he had built, in our words, in our terms, in our context, a very successful ministry. He would not, John the Baptist would not identify this way or with this, but in our context, the way to understand him best is to say that John the Baptist was a very successful pastor. If he were a modern day pastor, he would be invited on all the podcasts. He would speak at all the conferences. He would have a large church with multiple campuses. He would have this huge ministry. He'd be a best-selling author. And listen to me. I don't think that anything that I just said defines true success for a pastor. I have a much deeper respect for men and women who humbly serve their community in the name of God, in the being virtually unknown but faithfully pour their life out into a community and manage to retire as a pastor because they kept it between the ditches the whole time. I have a much greater respect for those people, for those men and women, than I do for people that have skyrocketed into Christian fame. Not that I don't respect that. I just don't think that's how God measures our success as people, how big our ministry is. But by the world's standards, what I want you to see is that by every measure, John the Baptist was a popular pastor with a successful ministry. He was baptizing people. People were following him and listening to him every day by the hundreds. Hugely successful and locally famous. And then Jesus comes on the scene. And John the Baptist actually baptizes him in the Jordan River. And Jesus and John the Baptist are cousins. And just so we're clear, John the Baptist is different from John the Apostle. John the Apostle was a disciple of Christ. He was the disciple whom Jesus loved. He wrote John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and Revelation. That's a different John. John the Baptist is the cousin of Jesus who paved the way for him and was prophesied about and who was eventually beheaded by Herod. Different Johns. And people started peeling away from John's church, again, crude language, but for us to understand, started peeling away from John's church and going to Jesus' church. And some of his disciples come to him, and they go, hey, you're losing members. People are not following you anymore, they're following Jesus. And this is John's response. And I think the heart of this response is why Jesus thinks John the Baptist is the greatest man to ever live. Verse 26, chapter 3 in the book of John. And said to him. And they say, John, that guy that you baptized, Jesus, people are following him now. They're leaving you and they're following him. And John the Baptist says, good. That's the way it's supposed to work out. See, John had spent his adult life building a kingdom, amassing a ministry, building a following, establishing a name for himself, becoming successful. He had spent his life building a kingdom. And then Jesus comes on the scene and Jesus begins to peel off portions of that kingdom for himself. And John's disciples come to him and they go, hey, this kingdom that you've been building, it's shrinking. And John says, no, it's not. It's growing. It was never my kingdom. Those were never my people. I was always just holding them for Jesus. I'm part of the bridal party. He's the groom. When he shows up, I don't get disappointed because everyone's paying attention to him and not me. That's dumb. I did a wedding yesterday and I'm in line to walk everybody in and the groomsmen are talking about, is it right over left or left over right? And I looked at them and I said, doesn't matter. No one's looking at you at all. John the Baptist knew his place. He's in the party. He's not the party. And so when Jesus shows up and his disciples say, hey, he's taken your kingdom. John the Baptist says, no. He's just claiming what's his. It was never mine to begin with. They were never following me. I was a conduit to Christ. I was never baptizing them in my name. I was always baptizing them in his name. And then he says that remarkable phrase, he must become greater and I must become less. That rings true in so many different scenarios for so many different reasons. And I would say in our life, one of our great challenges as Christians is to really understand what that means, that he must become greater and I must become less in every situation. So here's what I want you to see this morning. And here's why I believe this idea is so crucial and critical. Because I talk about people trying to build ministries, talk about people trying to build kingdoms, and I know that at least over half of us, if not more of us in here, we're not trying to do that. We're not trying to build a big ministry. We're not trying to build a big kingdom. We've got very humble goals in our life. But what I want you to see this morning is this. We are all building a kingdom, all of us. The question is, whose kingdom are you building? We are all building a kingdom. Make no mistake about it. The question is, whose kingdom are you building? Even if you're sitting here and you're going, my life is small. I have humble goals. I want to raise a good family. I want my children to love me when they grow up and want to come back home. I want to love my spouse and love and serve them well for the remainder of my days. I want to be a good friend to the people around me. I want to be a good part of the church that I love. We might have humble goals, but make no mistake, that's still our kingdom. It's a kingdom of safety and security and affection and compassion. It's how we leave our mark by leaving children behind us or a family behind us. So even if we have humble goals, we still have goals of building kingdoms. And oftentimes those kingdoms are our own. We're not building those for God's sake. We're building those for our own sake. Others of us are on the other end of the spectrum. I have a friend that I talk to often. He's a couple years older than me. He's like 45. And he talks about how driven he feels all the time. How even if he had the money to retire forever right now, he's like, I don't think I could just do nothing. I don't think I could just bounce from pleasure to pleasure. I have to build something. I have to wake up every day and spend time knowing that I'm building something that matters. He very much struggles with rest. He relentlessly pursues the building of his kingdom. And some of us have big lofty goals. We want to build the company. We want to build the ministry. We want to leave the legacy. We want to climb the ladder. We want to get to this position. We want to do this thing and make these impacts. Whether or not we build a kingdom operates irrespective of our ambition. Do you understand? No matter how ambitious you are or are not, you will spend your life building a kingdom. The question I want to put in front of you is, whose kingdom are you building? I would remind you of what Jesus says in Matthew. Do not put about it. Friendships rarely echo for eternity unless they're intentional. Family in and of itself doesn't echo for eternity. The company that you build doesn't echo for eternity unless you're using it for the kingdom of God. The wealth that you amass, the friends that you get, the power that you hold, the impact that you make doesn't echo for eternity unless it's for the sake of God and his kingdom. So God says, invest your life in things that will ripple throughout eternity. Don't invest your life in things that are buried with you. It's this hugely important principle. And it's important to me that you understand as I hope to compel you to consider what it looks like to build God's kingdom with your life. I don't want to talk about it in vague terms of building God's kingdom. I want us to understand exactly what it means to build it. To build God's kingdom is to actively and intentionally, this isn't in your notes, but you can write it down if you want to. To build God's kingdom is to actively and intentionally grow the kingdom in breadth and depth. It's to actively and intentionally grow the breadth of God's kingdom and grow the depth of God's kingdom. When we grow the breadth of God's kingdom, that's evangelism. When we grow the depth, that's discipleship. Evangelism, telling other people about Jesus, bringing them along with us. I tell you all the time, as much as I can, the only reason you are on the planet and not in heaven right now after you became a Christian is so that you can bring as many people with you on your way to God's kingdom as you possibly can as you live your life. So we're constantly looking for ways to expand the breadth and the reach of God's kingdom by sharing our faith. And in the South, this is really easy for us. You might think it's really challenging to share your faith in the South because it's saturated with the gospel. I actually think that makes it easier because I try to tell you, if you have friends or family members who live in the South and don't go to church, they don't claim a faith, I would be willing to bet you lunch that they have a good reason for that. It's not because they've never been invited. It's probably not because they don't have any experience with church. It's because whatever experience they do have with church wasn't good. Whatever experience they do have with pain and struggle has made them move away from the faith, not towards it. But if we went to your neighbors right now who are still at home, have no interest in going to church this morning, it wasn't even a thought for them, should we go? It's a Sunday for them. And you said, why isn't church a priority? They wouldn't be like, why is it what now? Why isn't what a priority? Why don't you know Jesus? Who? They know. They have answers. So in the South, if we want to be effective evangelists, our antenna are always up to have conversations with people about spirituality because here's what's really interesting in the Southern United States. Your explanation for why you're still in church. Your explanation for why you're still here. Your explanation for why you still claim a faith, why you've chosen to prioritize it, and it's important to you. And if we can have conversations not about, here's why you should be a Christian, here's why you should get back in church, but conversations about, here's why I still believe, here's what faith does for me, here's what I see and why I can't walk away. If we can have those conversations, we can start to open people's minds to a different church experience and a different experience of Jesus and their personal lives and maybe move them towards the kingdom of God and grow that kingdom in its breadth. And then as kingdom builders, we grow it in its depth. We grow the depth of the people who are Christians. We make disciples. At Grace, we call this being step-takers. Understanding that discipleship is nothing more than taking the next step of obedience that's been placed in front of you. And so we come alongside young mamas and we say, hey, here's what I've learned in my journey of being a mom. We come alongside young men and we say, here's what I've learned in my journey of being a father. We come alongside young divorcees and we say, here's what I've learned in my journey as a single woman or a single man. We come alongside parents. We come alongside young believers. And we walk them through that area of life and we grow them in their breadth, in their depth. So when I say, what is it, when I talk about building a kingdom and using our life to build God's kingdom, that's what I'm talking about, is using our life to grow it in its breadth and in its depth. We should go through life with our antenna up at all times, looking for opportunities to do just that. And this idea of what it is to build God's kingdom and how devoted we should be to it is really what the Christian life is. And the Christian life is a progressive revelation of this truth. It's a progressive revelation of what it means to build God's kingdom. And really, what the reality of it is, that that's the only reason that we're here. And I'll tell you where this started to occur to me and change the paradigm in a way that I thought about my faith. I was 17 or 18 years old at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge, and the speaker was a guy that really impacted me named Greg Boone. I can't remember if it was my first or second summer there, but at one point he wrote, he drew a circle on a whiteboard, and he said, I want you to tell me the things in your life that matter to you. Tell me about the different parts of your life. What does your life consist of? And so we said family. He draws a family slice. And then we said sports, friends, faith, hobbies, college, education, whatever it was. And so we kind of made this pie chart of all the different areas of our life. And Greg says, it's interesting that you made this sliver of faith. That's your Christianity. That's the part of you that's devoted to God. And we're like, yes. And he goes, okay. God's not interested in your slice. He wants the whole dang pie. And as adults, we do this too. We offer God a slice and he wants the whole pie. I bet if I sat down with you, just like somebody could with me, with no context, and I said, hey, I got a thought exercise for you. Can you draw a circle on a piece of paper? And you did that. And I said, okay, can you just draw up a pie chart of your priorities in your life? And could you try to make the slices proportional to how much you actually feel they're important? You know, we draw a big family slice, right? Some of us would draw a big church slice, big career slice, hobbies, interests, curiosity, whatever else is in there. I'd be interested to know, and only you know this, I've no doubt that virtually everyone in here would have a faith slice. How big would that be? Would it be a sliver? Would it be a huge chunk? Regardless, God's not interested in either of those. He wants the whole pie. He wants all of you. Do you mean God intimately cares about how I conduct myself in business meetings? Yeah, I do. I do because you're his agent in those meetings and through you should spread the fragrance and the knowledge of God. We should be salt in people's saltless lives. We should be lights in darkness. Do you mean that God cares about how I behave in traffic? He actually does. That one stings. Do you mean God cares about how I father? About how much I participate in church? About how much of my finances I give? About how I behave with my friends? About what I watch on TV and whether or not that helps me run my race and build his kingdom? Do you mean to tell me that God cares about what books I read and which people I spend the most time around? Yes, he cares deeply about all of those things. He cares where you live. He cares who your neighbors are. He cares how you carry yourself. He cares about your reputation in your community. He cares about everything, not just your church attendance and not just how much you read his word and not just how much you pray, but he cares about how you treat the person when you're on vacation that you will never interact with again in your life. That interaction matters deeply to God because it is indicative of your character and whether or not your light is shining and the fragrance is spreading. Those things matter to God. That's why I say that this realization of what it is to be a kingdom builder is a progressive revelation throughout your whole life. When I understood the pie chart analogy when I was 18 years old, I thought I got it. Intellectually, I'm there. And every year that goes by, I realize that God is asking me for more, that I've been holding back from him, that I've been considering my piece of the pie. And let me show you how powerful it is when it finally clicks with us, that we are here to build God's kingdom and not our own. I want us to look at Peter, and it's actually Gibson that gave me this point. I thought it was a great one. Think about Peter in the Gospels, what we experience of him. Peter was one of these guys that he was ready, fire, aim, right? Just the first one to speak. My dad likes to say about me, my family calls me Nathan, and he likes to say about me, Nathan having nothing to say, thus said. That's what he says about me. All right. Zach knows what I'm talking about. Nathan having nothing to say, thus says, there are those of us who are just wired, ready, fire, aim. I got it. I'll go. And we see this in Peter, which is why I love him so much. He's the first one. Jesus is walking on the water. Jesus is like, okay. Or Peter says, well, I'm walking on the water too. And he walks on the water for a little bit. And then he sinks. And everybody's like, oh, Peter doesn't have any faith. And it's like, you sissies are still in the boat. At least he got out, you know. Jesus says, Peter, I need to wash all of your feet. And Peter goes, you will never wash my feet. And he says, if I don't wash your feet, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven. And Peter says, well, then don't stop at my feet. Go all the way to my head. He requests a sponge bath from Christ. That's the boldness of Peter. Jesus says, you will deny me. Peter says, I will die before I deny you. And then in his weakness, he denies him three times. Whenever Jesus would ask one of those really hard questions, who do you say that I am? And all the disciples would clam up and not make eye contact and please don't look at me. Peter was the first one to be like, you sissies, I got this. And then he'd answer. And sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong, but he was always the one willing to be out in front. He was always brash. He was always courageous. He was always the leader. And so we see flashes of this giftedness in Peter that's not directed in the right way just yet. And then after Jesus dies and comes back and finds a despondent Peter on the banks of the Sea of Galilee and restores him to ministry. Beautiful. He spends 40 days with the disciples encouraging them. And then he leaves. And he says, I'm going to go to heaven. And I want you to go to the ends of the earth and I want you to baptize them and make disciples. I want you to go. He didn't use this language, but it's our language this morning. I want you, Peter, to go and your job is to grow my kingdom through this thing we call the church in breadth and in depth. Go evangelize to the whole world and go make disciples of them. Grow the kingdom in breadth and depth. And then he sits in the upper room for 40 days waiting for the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes, he realizes what his job is. They go out on the porch. They preach. 3,000 people become Christians that day. And then we get this wonderful picture of the early church in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47. And day by day, God added to their number those who were being saved. So now this movement is off. Now the kingdom has exploded. And the Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of Israel at the time, take notice of this. They're like, we've got to stop this. What are we going to do? And so they bring in Peter and John, and they put them on trial. Defend yourself. Two chapters later, they bring in Stephen to defend himself, and he becomes the first Christian martyr, and he's stoned to death. Eighty days prior, Jesus had to defend himself on the same charges, and they crucified him. So make no mistake about it. In this defense for what they are doing, their lives are at stake. They've just healed someone, and the authority of Christ, they are preaching the gospel of Christ, and now they're being put on trial in front of the Sanhedrin, and I want you to see their amazing response. Also, if you're looking at the clock, I'm going long. Suck it up. Acts chapter 4. You're going to see verse 9, and I'm going to start in verse 8. name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He says, it's on you. You want to know whose name it's in? It's in the name of Christ, that guy that you murdered. That's what we're doing this in. Incredibly courageous, speaking truth to power, completely vulnerable to the death penalty. They do not care. They're stepping. He is Peter. He's a leader. He is brash, ready, fire, aim. But now he has purpose and he's speaking with incredible courage. Verse 11, Jesus is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone. Salvation is found in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. When they, the Sanhedrin and the people around them, saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished. And they took note that these men had been with Jesus. When they saw the courage and the eloquence of Peter that day, they knew we can't touch these guys or we're going to have a riot on our hands. So we've got to step away and try to play this a little bit differently. With his life on the line, Peter boldly proclaims the gospel of Christ and speaks truth to power. And what we see is these flashes of giftedness in the gospels where we get a glimpse into the character of Peter. Now he has a place to put it. Now he has traction in his life. Now he has understanding and context for, oh, that's what these gifts are for. And now he can use them courageously and fearlessly and correctly with efficacy to do his job and grow the kingdom in breadth and in depth. So here's what we see from the example of Peter. And here's what I want you to feel in your life. With the realization of purpose comes the application of our gifts. Each of you, each of you are gifted in some way. I know this to be true because the Bible says it over and over again. Paul talks about in Corinthians that the church is the body of Christ, and everybody is a part of that body, and everybody has a part to play. We're told in Ephesians, I remind you all the time that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we should walk in them. You have a good work to walk in. We're told in Ephesians chapter four that we have the gifts of Christ, of pastor, apostle, shepherd, evangelist, or teacher. Every one of us is one of those five things. We have those gifts. And when we can match those gifts with purpose, we light the world on fire. When we align God's divine purpose for our life with the gifts that God has given us in our life. And we have the narrative traction in our life of a purpose that is larger than ourselves to build God's kingdom. And we look at our gifts and what he's given us and suddenly we have an alignment of purpose and giftedness and we understand for the first time why God made me this way and how we are to use those gifts to build his kingdom. We light the world on fire. That's when magic happens. That's when we add day by day to those who are being saved. That's when you get up in the morning excited about what God has for you. Can I just say to you that if you have noticed in your life that you've been spending your days bouncing from distraction to distraction and from pleasure to pleasure and you're walking listlessly through your days and you're not super motivated for what you're doing, can I just suggest to you that maybe it's because you're living your life, building your own kingdom and you you realize it stinks, and that what you need to realize is that God designed you to build his kingdom, and he's gifted you to do that. And if you can figure out what that means and how your gifts can align with purpose, you will never wake up again wondering how you should spend your day. You will know because you will be directed because when our purpose is revealed, we have an application for a giftedness. So here's my prayer to you. Here's my prayer for you and the prayer that I want you to pray. God, show me how I might be used to build your kingdom rather than my own. God, show me how I might be used to build your kingdom rather than my own. And here's what I really like about this being kind of the apex trait of grace. I'm going to say this and then I'll wrap up. As I was considering what kind of church do we want Grace to be, where do we want to push people, what's our heart, how do we want to grow, what's our focus as a church? You know good and well some churches answer that question and they say missions. We're a missions church. That's what we're going to do. If you're involved with this church, we're going to move your heart towards missions to give and to serve in that way. Some churches say next generation. We're going to focus on the next generation. We're going to invest in our children and in our students. And if you're a part of the church, we're going to move you in that way. Some churches say foster care and adoption. We're going to push everybody in that way. Some churches choose local impact and local ministry. We want to make a big impact in our community. And different churches choose different paths. And I have no critique for any of those paths. but as I thought about this, I didn't want to limit your vision for building God's kingdom to whatever my passion of the day was or whichever direction the wind was blowing in the elder board. We didn't want to limit what people should do with the giftedness that God has given them. If this means you need to leave and start your own church because you've got that fire in you, go and do it. We love you. We support you. If this means you need to move and start a ministry somewhere, go and do it. We support you. But if we can be your home base as you go out into the community and in the world and build God's kingdom, we want to continue to foster that within you and build a church of fierce builders of the kingdom of God. And that can look different ways for different people. For my wonderful father-in-law, they got a lake house. And I remember when they bought this lake house, they were like, we're going to use it to serve the kingdom. And I was like, I bet you are. Sure you are. What, are you going to pray on the boat? But every weekend, while his daughter was in college, 10 or more kids would come and they'd spend the whole weekend being fed and pulled around on the boat by, they called him Professor Benson. He was not a professor, but they were in college, so fit. And they came every weekend. And when those kids graduated, he got invited to weddings. And when they had their first baby, he got texted pictures. And when I had the chance to speak at his funeral, there was a row of about 20 of them that had traveled from all over the country to come pay their respect to John. He used that lake house to build God's kingdom. I know a man who's been successful in business. And he's taken that success and he uses that company to support people who spent their professional years in ministry and now don't have the means to take care of themselves in retirement. They're on the payroll even though they don't do anything because he has a heart for them and how they spent their life. He uses different people in his company to do the finances for nonprofits for free and they give away large portions of their profit, more than 10% to other ministries and he uses his business acumen to sit on the board of nonprofits and help them become effective in their ministries. He has a vision for what it is to use his giftedness to build God's kingdom, not his own. Or maybe, maybe what God has for us to do right now is to build up those children, is to patiently, daily, with consistency and godliness and grace, build the character of our children so that they might enter into the world with a larger vision for what this life can be and simply what they want to do with it. And maybe we can build the kingdom like my mom did. I don't know what it looks like for you to build God's kingdom. But I do know that it's how you should spend the rest of your life. I don't care if you're 85 or 15. Let's pray that we would be a church full of passionate kingdom builders and just see how God lights the world on fire around us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for imbuing us with purpose. Thank you for giving us something to live for that's bigger than ourselves. God, I pray that we would each have a passionate vision of what it is to be used by you, no matter how big or how small that vision might be. Lord, show us how we can use the gifts that you've given us to have a metamorphosis like Peter, where we see these flashes of our giftedness and how you've created us. But God, then we get some traction with some purpose, and our gifts align with that. Let us experience what it is to wake up every day excited to be used by you. And God, where we are building our own kingdoms, we repent and we apologize. And we ask you to help us, reorient us towards your kingdom. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.